ROMANTICISM
Introduction If the Enlightenment was a movement which started among a tiny elite and slowly spread to make its influence felt throughout society, Romanticism was more widespread both in its origins and influence. No other intellectual/artistic movement has had comparable variety, reach, and staying power since the end of the Middle Ages. Beginning in the last decades of the 18th century, it transformed poetry, the novel, drama, painting, sculpture, all forms of concert music (especially opera), and ballet. It was deeply connected with the politics of the time, echoing people's fears, hopes, and aspirations. It emphasized the individual experience rather than the tested formulas which are in accordance with propriety. Ghazal Daftari 17:04, December 20, 2010 (UTC)Ghazal Daftari Significant Figures Jane Austen Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English gentry.She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer.Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about 35 years old. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it. Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture. William Blake William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language".His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced".Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself".Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic",for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England, Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions,as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blake as a "glorious luminary,"and as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors." Historian Peter Marshall has classified Blake as one of the forerunners of modern anarchism, along with Blake's contemporary William Godwin. Lord Byron George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron (January 22, 1788 – April 19, 1824) was an English poet of the Romantic school, who was easily the most popular and controversial poet of his time. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." That sums up Byron's life and popularity. He was a "bad boy" celebrity in a time before celebrity became commonplace. Byron's bad behavior had its unintended victims. The obvious ones are the women he seduced and left. A less obvious one is ironically the genius of Byron's work as a poet, which has been obscured by an endless stream of gossip over his personal life. As a poet, Byron is most closely linked to Percy Bysshe Shelley with whom he became a close friend; and who, like him, was a rebel and iconoclast. Their poetry would share some of the same interests, though Byron would generally be more well-known as an author of ironic verse where as Shelley's poems tended towards the gloomy and the grandiose. Outside of this one significant connection it is somewhat difficult to place Byron in relation to the other poets of his time; though he has been labeled as a Romantic due to his radical views of politics and morality, his verse does not share the nature-obsession and fascination with the supernatural that more generally characterizes poets of the Romantic school. Byron was a character unto himself, an oddity in his own time and in any time, and because of this he remains enduringly popular and continually provocative. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge ] He was born October 21, 1772, in Ottery St. Mary, Devon, England, the yungest child of a clergyman. At the age of ten he entered Christ's Hospital school in London, where he read a wide variety of classical and political works. In 1794, he published his first poetry in the Morning Chronicle. ''As Chronicled by Daniel Robinson, Coleridge tried his hand at sonnets but failed utterly and abandoned the form. In 1795, he began giving a series of lectures to finance the utopian scheme, but when the idea was abandoned, he returned to writing poetry. From 1797 to 1798, he lived at Nether Stowey in Somerset, and comleted the poems "The ancient Mariner," "Frost at Midnight," "Fears in Solitude," and "Kubla Khan," some of his best-known works. In 1798, with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, he traveled to Germany, where he became deeply interested in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Coleridge's addiction to opium gradually overtook him and his marriage. He traveled to Malta in 1804 in an attempt to restore his mental and physical health, as well as his marriage. He returned to England in 1806, but by then his marriage had fallen apart. '''_Rose Meschi_' John Keats Alexander Pushkin Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley William Wordsworth Ghazal Daftari 17:01, December 20, 2010 (UTC)Ghazal Daftari Representative Works Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Eugene Onegin Frankenstein Pride and Prejudice Prometheus Unbound Songs of Innocence and Experience "To Autumn" Ghazal Daftari 17:17, December 20, 2010 (UTC)Ghazal Daftari Characteristics Dreams and Visions Pantheism The Self Emotion and Feeling Ghazal Daftari 17:21, December 20, 2010 (UTC)Ghazal Daftari This School in Popular Culture http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1343528192/tt0414387 (You can see the poster by clicking here.) Pride and Prejudice Sparks fly when spirited Elizabeth Bennett meets single, rich, and proud Mr. Darcy. But Mr. Darcy reluctantly finds himself falling in love with a woman beneath his class. Can each overcome their own pride and prejudice? '' http://www.imdb.com/media/rm4087124480/tt0021884 (You can see the poster by clicking here.) ''Frankenstein ''A Horror classic in which an obsessed scientist assembles a living being from parts of exhumed corpses. '' Ghazal Daftari ''10:10, January 5, 2011 (UTC)Ghazal Daftari Interesting Webpages on This School http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/romanticism.html Ghazal Daftari 17:12, December 20, 2010 (UTC)Ghazal Daftari Read About Edmund Burke's work which influenced Romanticism here. The previous session, when talking about Blake, we talked about his strange view of heaven and hell, etc, best shown in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Meanwhile, read this short poem which shows his philosophy. '''The Two Songs' I heard an Angel Singing When the day was springing: "Mercy, pity, and peace, Are the world's release."So he sang all day Over the new-mown hay, Till the sun went down, And the haycocks looked brown. I heard a devil curse Over the heath and the furse: "Mercy vould be no more If there were nobody poor, And pity no more could be If all were happy as ye: And mutual fear brings peace, Misery's increase Are mercy, pity, and peace." At his curse the sun went down, And the heavens gave a frown.